How to Disappear (5 page)

Her private messages from her friend Olivia are more promising, as in:

What’s going on? Steve says he signed you into rehab. For one night of jello shots at Glen’s?!?!? Is he insane?

He is insane. He says you can’t talk to anyone outside the program or you’ll lose your resolve. WHAT PROGRAM????

Please if you get this I’m begging you tell me where you are.

I take from this that Nicolette is tight with her fellow cheerleaders, Mendes says she’s in rehab, and she has a best friend who loves her and is amazed about the rehab. Rehab? Well, we know she does Jell-O shots, but that’s a long way from round-the-clock slurred speech and blackouts.

This is my one idea about how to find Nicolette Holland: get to Olivia.

At least she’s easy to locate. Olivia’s mom has been tagging pictures of her and Nicolette since they were in seventh grade.

Nicolette cheers in a group photo with blue-and-gold pom-poms.

Olivia takes a red ribbon at a science fair in Columbus.

Nicolette cheers some more.

All these albums of Nicolette and Olivia and this Disney-princess–looking girl named Jody rocking prom dresses ought to be captioned
Typical Teen Girls
. I get how people always say, “He was a nice neighbor. He liked gardening,” about guys who turn out to have dungeons in their cellars. But there’s nothing about Nicolette that screams “heading to death row.”

Also, if Esteban Mendes is nothing to her like Don says, someone should tell Mendes. Because he shows up at a lot of track meets and fund-raiser car washes, where he can be seen draping a towel over Nicolette’s body to cover her smaller-than-small bikini. He looks intense—not a shocker for Karl Yeager’s accountant.

There’s no bimbo mom in sight. You have to figure that, practically speaking, Nicolette is Esteban’s daughter. Judging from all the church bake sales he’s attended with her (Olivia’s dad, Mr. Pastor,
is
a pastor), Don’s idea that Mendes would be fine with his kid lying dead on the altar won’t fly.

I wonder if anybody else is coming on here like me, pretending to be “Nicky,” looking for hints of her location. For all I know, her log-in info is carved into the bathroom wall at Yucca Valley Correctional.

When I can’t stand looking at her anymore, I google Connie Marino.

On a video from a Detroit local news station, her mother’s voice cracks as she begs anyone who knows where Connie is to bring her back. Seeing her like that—not knowing that Connie is never coming back, and that this crazy, normal-looking Nicolette did it—by the second time through, anticipating the moment when she covers her face with her hands, I’m choked up.

• • •

What the fuck, Nicolette, WHY?

Luna keeps knocking on my door, inviting me up to her manager’s apartment to watch TV. She keeps calling me “girlfriend.” As in, “Want to watch
Game of Thrones
with me, girlfriend?”

Her
girlfriend
with no ID.

I want a girlfriend so bad, I’m afraid I’m going to tell her something. That I’ll accept her offer of Long Island Iced Tea—which she calls Longhorn Iced Tea—and then I’ll get all buzzed and talkative and self-destructive.

I sit there on Luna’s couch, my tongue stuck between my teeth, biting down to remind myself to avoid anything with vodka in it. Reminding myself to shut up and work on getting her to let me do her makeup.

“It’s been a month,” Luna says. “Does this guy even know you’re in Galkey?”

I shake my head, which at this point has red hair. That, plus thick drawn-on eyebrows and big square glasses constitute my entire disguise.

Luna sighs. “Your a-hole sounds more like the kind of guy’s gonna look for you at a biker bar. You really think he’s going to track you down if you ride over to the college and hang out with kids your own age Saturday night?”

Set me loose at a college on Saturday night?

It’s like offering a crack addict her own little pipe.

You know it’s bad for you. You know it’s the worst thing for you. But scared as you are of life beyond the walls of the Bluebonnet, you kind of don’t care.

I know it’s this kind of thinking that got me into the backseat of a Chevy Camaro with the worst guy in the world for me.

I know Luna’s theory that the bogeyman isn’t going to find me if I head out into the warm Texas night is total BS.

But I want to believe her.

She pats me on the arm. A hand on my skin.

I would have kissed Connor, my second-to-last poor-choice ex, right then, even though he’s 90 percent slime, just to feel his 10 percent human arms around me. I’m starting to relate to those baby monkeys in honors psychology who shrivel
up and die because they only have wire mothers. Meanwhile, the monkeys with fluffy, soft mother dolls snuggle into the fur and eat their mashed bananas.

“Cheer up,” Luna says. “I’ve got something for you.”

Three ancient red bicycles are chained up in a utility closet in the alley behind the motel. Apparently, Mrs. Bluebonnet decided people would rent three-speeds. Nobody did, and here they are.

Luna points into the alley. “Hop on, and you could be at Tech having a good old time in ten minutes.”

I try not to pant, that’s how much I want to jump on one of those red bikes and book it out of here. Even though I can spot an impulse that bad from fifty yards away.

I half-know I’m lying to myself. Telling myself that if I pedal around at twilight, I’ll be basically invisible.

That it’s not even that big of a risk.

Eight summers of cheerleading camp, and I know a lot of girls who party on three continents. I get it. But half the time, people can’t even tell who I am right away at Halloween when I do weird enough makeup. And who’s even
heard
of South Texas Tech, Galkey? It’s not like I’m going to a party at Ohio State.

I can tell that how much I want five minutes that approximate normal—five minutes when I can pretend I’m leading a whole other kind of life—might be clouding my thinking. But there’s an actual plus column.

If I went out, I could forage for all the stuff TV characters who run away on purpose take with them. Granted, they mostly use these provisions during the zombie apocalypse. But if (when) I have to run (soon), it wouldn’t hurt to have it.

Plus this could solve the dilemma of Mrs. Bluebonnet’s mandatory ID. Colleges have freshmen in need of fake IDs, and people who know where to get them. To save myself, I have to have some fake ID, right?

And a fake ID procurement outfit from Goodwill. Nice enough to get guys to want to help me find fake ID. Not good enough for them to remember the next day.

And an ice pick.

Plus, I buy a daypack, more makeup, a rainbow of hair dye, and nutrition bars to keep me from having to sneak candy out of any more mini-marts if I get stranded.

There’s the cutest dress, summery, backless, midnight-blue. And sandals I can’t justify spending seven dollars on, except that they’re the highest heels in the place. Being a whole different height is good, right?

What does it say about me that even when life hits its most wretched moment of sadness, shopping is still fun?

I feel so bold, grabbing clothes off hangers, sliding shoes onto my feet.

On the way back to the Bluebonnet, I stop at a convenience store with country music blasting out the open door.

I buy a prepaid burner phone.

“For emergencies,” I say to the cashier. I don’t know why.

I feel so sly and furtive. Like a drug dealer or, I guess, me.

Not that I plan to call 9-1-1 anytime soon, but if I see it coming, at least I want to tell a couple of people I love them before permanently hanging up.

That, and where the body’s buried.

I’m the guy who can always concentrate at school. I can shut out anything, turn off my mind and any trouble flowing through it like a faucet turns off water. I was in class nine days after they killed my dad, handing in make-up work.

Now I’m sitting in AP English, seeing and hearing nothing, trying to figure this out. I’ve run through every conceivable scenario a hundred times. Best case, I disappear into Don’s alternate universe for a short nightmare. I wake up with a couple of weeks shot to hell, but to my same life and plans, college, and future.

The most striking flaw is that it’s also the least realistic scenario—and how do you have a best case that someone else doesn’t wake up from?

My teacher, Mr. Berger, looks pissed.

“
‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’?
What say you, Mr. Manx?” Jesus, this guy is pretentious. And seriously? This poem has a built-in, teacher-approved right answer, which ordinarily I’d be rolling out, if only to one-up Dan Barrons. Not today.

“It’s condescending.”

Berger is pacing around like a matador waiting for the bull to charge.

All I want to do is charge, gore him, and leave town.

“All the ordinary jerks take the big road with the streetlights. The superior poetic guy we’re supposed to admire takes the cool nonconformist road. Come on, did you ever find one student who thought it was cool to take the
more
traveled road?”

Mr. Berger says, “Did you
read
this poem?”

After English, Calvin corners me by my locker. “What’s wrong with you?”

I don’t blurt things I don’t want blurted, even to Calvin, even when we’re plowed and running off at the mouth. But I blurt, “I have to run an errand for Don.”

“Are you brain-damaged?”

Don’s my go-to excuse for acting brain-damaged, even I know this. And according to my former girlfriend—and Dan Barron’s current girlfriend—Scarlett, I’m the least insightful guy in Nevada.

“I have to get out of here. Want to say we’re camping until college?”

“Riiiiiight.” Calvin doesn’t camp. Boy Scout camp with Calvin was me doing all his camping shit for him and him paying me off with poker winnings taken off guys from other troops who thought
they knew how to play cards. “You want to tell me where you’re really going?”

I shake my head.

“Cool,” he says. “A mystery errand for a sociopath.”

“No choice.”

He waves his arms like a distraught stick figure. “Because free will is an illusion?”
Is anyone not pissed at me today?
“Maybe you need to think this over.”

“That’s helpful. Maybe you need to go screw yourself.”

“Maybe you need me to tutor you on Robert Frost and vocab, asshole.”

The most ridiculous part of the day is that I like the poem.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Only some guys don’t get to screw around in the woods in Wherever-the-Hell, New Hampshire, bird-watching or whatever Robert Frost was doing. They get stuck on a third path that leads straight out of the woods.

“Have fun telling your mom,” Calvin says.

• • •

Unfortunately, I’m not doing that well breaking it to my mom that I’m heading out of the endless subdivisions and strip malls of home. She’s the kind of mom who, if you have a condom in
your wallet, will find it and want to know what it’s doing there. You’d think she’d have been happy she had one stand-up kid: she wasn’t. It’s hard to figure, if she notices something that small, how I’m going to slip out of town.

I love my mom—she went through worse than I did—but I’m going rogue, and there’s nothing she likes about rogue on me. I’m thinking I’ll tell her over dinner, but she slides a platter of pork chops across the kitchen table and clears her throat, generally a preamble to me being in for it.

“If this is about mouthing off to Mr. Berger, I’m not apologizing for how I interpret a poem.”

“Jackson, look at me and tell me you didn’t cut class this morning.”

“I haven’t cut all year! How can you ask me that as if I did it?”

I don’t ever catch a break from her. When I cut one day after APs last year, she acted like I was headed straight to lockup. She made me paint the garage two coats of Navajo White. By the second coat, it was ninety-five degrees outside, and the garage looked fine without it.

The way she sat quietly for her whole married life when she had this in her is a testament to my dad’s powers of intimidation.

“Is this a random check to see if I’m a repeat offender? Does the house need painting? Thanks, Mom.”

“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. “The motion detectors went off this morning, and the dogs were in the yard. If you came home, that would explain it.”

All of a sudden, I don’t care what she thinks I did. “When did
they go off? Is there security footage? Did the patrol come by?”

“Calm down! Security malfunctioned. It happens. The fire probably destroyed some wires. There’s nothing to worry about—unless you cut.”

“Seriously, Mrs.
Manx
?”

“There hasn’t been a peep from your dad’s business associates in years. There’s no reason it would start now.”

The ways she says
business associates
could make plants wither.

“Somebody was in our
house
. What does the security guy say?”

“Jack, enough! It was a hiccup in the wiring.”

It wasn’t a hiccup in the wiring.

“Try not to get so overwrought!” she says.

“Yes, ma’am.” I might hit the
ma’am
too hard—I go to a school where five hundred kids are forced to speak as if we were alive during the Civil War, so it happens.

“Try that again without the smirk.”

Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. It doesn’t matter how respectfully or disrespectfully I do this. I have to get to Ohio
now
. By Thursday, by the second Don calls, I need to be ready. The second after he calls, I need to be gone. I need a plan and I want a beer, which means that I have to push a mound of string beans around my plate until I can get to Calvin’s.

• • •

I’m sprawled in Calvin’s desk chair, flanked by his computers and their many monitors, and the equipment that takes up half his room.
He and Monica are cross-legged on the bed, holding controllers and playing Mermaid Ninjas. Monica made Mermaid Ninjas. It’s the most boring game ever conceived unless you’re
really
into mermaids. I sit there while they nuke angry mermen and evil aquatic elves.